The U.S. Congress is summoning executives of big oil companies such as BP, Chevron, Exxon, Shell and others to testify on October 28 about their decades-long misinformation campaigns about the climate emergency.
The process is modeled after the Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement, which in the 1990s succeeded in holding the big tobacco companies accountable for the misinformation they had helped create denying the harmful effects of tobacco, forcing them to settle for large settlements. …
Microsoft is to offer subscribers password-free access to their accounts — it had been doing so for corporate customers since last March — and by popularizing its use, is moving closer to a future in which passwords will give way to much more efficient and secure authentication systems.
The feature requires downloading Microsoft Authenticator, which will require permissions to send notifications and a secure authentication system such as FaceID or the user’s fingerprint (or, alternatively, Windows Hello, the use of a physical security key or a verification code sent via SMS or email). After installing an authentication method, we just…
Facebook’s launch of Ray-Ban Stories, a pair of almost normal-looking glasses equipped with a camera, sound and communication via a smartphone, once again illustrates the threat to privacy on social networks from a company with an unenviable record of flagrant irresponsibility in this regard.
The product differs radically from previous smart glasses such as Google’s or Snap’s in one fundamental way: they were designed to be easily recognizable as “special” glasses, equipped with a camera that showed when it was in use; but Ray-Ban Stories look like perfectly normal glasses — in three standard Ray-Ban models: the iconic Wayfarer, the…
For a few days now, the streets of Madrid and other major Spanish cities have returned to pre-pandemic levels of gridlock. The lifting of most restrictions, together with many companies’ decision to force their employees to return to the office, combined with the return of children to school mean that, for yet another year, traffic jams are once again a feature of life in cities at rush hour.
Endless columns of cars inching their way forward, in most cases weighing more than a ton, being used to move a 12 stone individual, the nadir of inefficiency, and on most occasions…
In the years I have been writing about technology, I have often mentioned the steady disappearance of the wallet, an object I hate, that I find uncomfortable to carry, and that, moreover, I see as perfectly replaceable.
Last December, I commented on how in Spain it was already possible to obtain a perfectly valid digital copy of a driver’s license from the Directorate General of Traffic, which I no longer need to keep in my very small wallet (a minimalistic Secrid in which only six flat or four embossed credit cards fit), another step in the same direction.
The Singapore police are to deploy two robots, named Xavier, on the streets of the city-state, intended to detect what they consider “undesirable behavior”, such as smoking in non permitted areas, street vending, or violation of pandemic-related restrictions on gathering or movement. The robots will report any infractions to officers at a central control.
The deployment, still in testing phase, will last three weeks, and follows previous experiments, such as the use of Boston Dynamics’ well-known quadruped robot Spot to monitor social distancing measures in parks and gardens, robots deployed in hospitals to carry out disinfection, or courier robots tasked…
Mark Zuckerberg recently told The Verge that he saw the metaverse as an area Facebook would be focusing on in the future.
The term is typically used to describe the concept of an iteration of the Internet composed of shared, persistent three-dimensional virtual spaces linked to a perceived virtual universe, It’s an interesting concept and worth exploring, but I’m not comfortable with Facebook doing so. Is it worth exploring activities that could range from interacting with other people, gaming, meetings, etc. in a persistent virtual environment? …
One of the most commonly used examples used in schools and colleges to explain the need for quantum computing is the so-called traveling salesman problem, which requires complex combinatorial optimization skills to solve the following question: “Given a list of cities and the distances between each pair of cities, what is the shortest possible route that visits each city exactly once and returns to the origin city?”
The problem also illustrates one faced every day by Amazon, the e-commerce giant, when considering its logistics operations: many customers condition the search for a given product using the tomorrow delivery option. This…
For some time now, Google, Apple, Amazon, Tesla, Facebook and Baidu have been saying they intend to start making their own chips instead of, as they have done for most of their history, using standard chips designed and manufactured by companies specializing in semiconductors.
Obviously, none of these companies is considering creating a proprietary chip as such: that requires a complex, highly fragmented industrial framework in which phases such as the design of the architecture, the manufacture of the necessary machinery and the chips as such, along with testing, are carried out by different highly specialized companies, some of which…
On September 7, El Salvador became the first country in the world to adopt bitcoin as legal tender, a risky experiment by the government and on which President Nayib Bukele has staked his political reputation.
The launch faces difficulties and has sparked protests across the country, with some businesses complaining that uptake of bitcoin will be mandatory (denied by the government), while critics warn it will be used by drug traffickers to launder money and that it is highly unstable; a fear borne out by the 9% fall in the price of bitcoin shortly after its launch, which is not…
